Ann Arbor Give Camp started with Jennifer Marsman, of Microsoft, wanting to organize an event to pull together the developer community in the Ann Arbor area. She had heard about a Give Camp organized in Dallas, where developers worked over a weekend to produce applications and/or websites for charities, and wondered if it would work here. She started organizing this a few months ago, and started soliciting charities.
45 charities submitted proposals, but only about 15 could be selected. A team of volunteers (including SRT's Bill Wagner and Patrick Steele) called charities to clarify requirements and to ensure that their projects could be done by a team over the weekend. It was critical that the charities be given something of value, something complete. The organizers thought that it was critical that the charities not be left holding partially done work. Other volunteers, including SRT's Lisa Zuber, reached out to area restaurants and stores for donations of food, water, and snacks. Lisa even stopped by on Friday night (her day off!) to deliver the snacks!
About 118 developers signed up (some on the day before the event!) and showed up at Washtenaw Community College on Friday July 11 to kick things off. Satellite teams worked in Knoxville, TN and in Columbus, OH. SRT's Patrick Steele and Mike Woelmer were in the main group working from Ann Arbor.
The blogs about Ann Arbor Give Camp are amazing. Jennifer has posted a list of blogs for GiveCamp on her blog; read more about it there. It was estimated that about a half of a million dollars in value was donated by these generous folks over the weekend. Great job, everyone! With a success like this in the first year of this event, I can only imagine that both charities and developers will be even more interested in contributing next time!